Berean Christian Stores will "probably" change the names of the four
Provident Bookstores it is buying from Mennonite Publishing (Shelf Awareness, October 24, 2006) and will make some cosmetic changes, Berean's president and CEO Les Dietzman told the Lancaster New Era.
The stores "will evolve with the times, as retailers must," he
continued. "Our job is not to sell what we want to sell but to meet our
customers' needs for Christian products. We take our cue from them.
We're very much in the service business." Dietzman is a former Wal-Mart
v-p.
Three of the four Provident stores are in Pennsylvania--Lancaster, New Holland and Souderton--and the other is in Wooster, Ohio.
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The Peppertree Bookstore, Palm Springs, Calif., which is opening a second store in Old Town La Quinta, Calif. (Shelf Awareness,
June 11, 2006), has not been able to get into the new space because the development's expansion has suffered
"utility and permit delays," according to the Desert Sun. The store had originally hoped to open in September.
The bookstore has dealt with the delay by renting a temporary space for
speaker events. "It's important for us . . . to let the residents at
this side of the valley know that Peppertree is coming here," bookstore
manager Chris Johnson told the paper.
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Tomorrow Greg Anastas will join the Perseus Books Group as v-p, sales operations. He has more than 12 years of experience at publishers such as HarperCollins and Hearst Book Group and was most recently director of customer operations at Simon & Schuster.
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Today's New York Times
spotlights Perceval Press, Santa Monica, Calif., and its
owner--although not necessarily in that order. The owner, who has lent
the endeavor the kind of magic every small press can use, is Viggo
Mortensen, who founded Perceval in 2002, soon after he finished playing
Aragorn in the Lord of the Rings trilogy. Actor Mortensen is also the
author of "art books that combine painting, photography, poetry,
journal entries and whatever else he cares to include, with interests
that also extend to fervently antiwar politics and music."
The press publishes about eight titles a year, has "no real advertising" and sells primarily from its Web site (which lists several stores in the Los Angeles area that stock its titles).